Where are users getting the impression that we are Gmail's help portal from?

Question

Probably at least once a day, we have users coming to the site and creating posts about forgotten Gmail passwords, trouble with logging in, etc.

Anecdotally, many of these posts seem to be written as though users think that they are communicating information directly to Google (they often include personal information and other details about the accounts).

I realize that we are here to help, and I'm very happy that we can give assistance to so many users through either the canonical Gmail post or via our expert users.

However, I would like to know how these users are finding us and what is leading them to believe that we are part of Google's internal support system? This is mainly out of curiosity, but I'm wondering how we can either be more explicit about where users are landing and whether we can warn them not to post personal information. Such a customized approach doesn't seem to have any precedent on Stack Exchange, so I'm attempting to understand the problem (if it is a problem) before recommending any action.

I looked around the Gmail help pages, and I didn't see any mention of our site. I also googled some common phrases like "gmail password help," "gmail help," "gmail recovery," etc. and we weren't even on the first page (!) of any of these searches.

Answer 1

I'm not an active user on this exchange, but I just noticed the question, so here goes my thought.

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Update 08/21/18: It is the #1 result and they even created a nice onebox for it.

If you search I've lost my gmail account it's the #2 result (after ads)

Change lost to can't find and it's (still) the 3rd result, other variations will still leave it in top 5

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When I click to that question the first thing that catches my eye is the Ask Question button.

From a some new users perspective, they will likely barely skim* through the post, then just immediately assume that this question will get asked directly to Google or that this site is for asking such questions.

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_{*The actual answer is quite a lot of scrolling - I know I wouldn't want to read through the whole thing when I can just ask directly.}

Answer 2

Google is the main traffic source. IIRC the second is Google Product Communties (forums).

Very frequently I found posts and comments that are just reporst that something is not working. In consideration of new users I made the following post:

Guide for Google apps users looking for help with features that suddenly stop working

The idea is to include a link to that post in comment to questions and answers from people that is very unlikely that will be making a post according to the site rules. It includes a brief description of the community, troubleshoting things to try and pointers.